I Do Not Pledge

This is not a story chapter, but it is short, and is not introduced here at random. I would like to talk about the influence of the child on the adult that they become, and how that interacts with the systems of rules that a risk-challenged child might run across (or perhaps into at high speed).

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The United States of America enforces a set of laws that define appropriate behavior for children. The moment that these kids become old enough to change those laws, the training wheels come off, and a broader set of adult laws takes over. In a country that advertises itself as being dedicated to a citizen’s freedom of choice, these rules help the child to learn what the penalties are for riding their personal rights roughshod over someone else’s freedoms. Currently, this system seems to be working about 98% of the time, given that 2% of our citizens are in jail.

If anyone has a better idea, a lot of people are listening.

The US has instituted some few gradations into this system so that the split between child and adult is not quite so strict. Children get to work and drive, with some restrictions, before they reach the age when they can vote. Well, okay, these sorts of exceptions were really put in place for the convenience of the adults, but let’s pretend that the grown-ups were being socially conscientious. You will notice, however, that there is no such ramping up when it comes to voting itself, which seems inconsistent.

Voting is the one activity that most clearly defines a citizen’s participation in a representative government as enfranchised adults, and yet we don’t give children any practice at it. I’m not talking about such events as voting in school elections, because that doesn’t change any of the rules that truly dominate their lives. There should be issues about which people are allowed to vote when they are younger than the current age of majority. They need to become disaffected much earlier with the whole process of casting ineffectual votes, so they won’t be so disappointed when they don’t grow up to be rich enough to buy an election.

And if they learn early enough to despise that fact of American politics, then maybe they’ll work harder to change it.

I am making an implicit assumption here, and it would be better if we were to discuss that issue explicitly before continuing with the remainder of this essay.

I am assuming that some adult behavior is predicated on what they learned as a child.

The Jesuits are said to have a maxim which goes something along the lines of, “Give me a child for the first few years, and you can do what you like with the adult.” There are many variations on this quote, but that doesn’t really matter because the Jesuits have no such saying; in fact, back in 1586, the Jesuit’s Ratio Studiorum said that no child should be admitted to their schools before the age of seven, because before that, the child needed a nanny, not a teacher. It was B.F. Skinner (the in/famous behavioral psychologist) who said, “Give me the child, and you give me the adult.” As it happens, both positions have some truth to them.

It’s not that you can’t overthrow the influences of your childhood, but rather that most people won’t think to try in the first place, which means that many early influences remain in place simply by default. Anyone who puts those principles in place will have a head start on influencing the consequent adult, as long as that adult leads an unexamined life; however, those adults who do try to change their behavior will find that some things are easy to change, while others can only be altered through an enormous effort of will, if at all. As you might suspect, some people are up to that challenge, and others are not. The quote would, therefore, be more realistic if it went as follows, “Give me a child, and maybe my influence will last. Then again, maybe not. But still.” So you see, people tend to support the two polarized positions of this argument simply because they prefer to quote a more elegant slogan (lazy-assed bastards that they are).

In short, then, my implicit assumption is that you should be careful with kids and learning, just in case.

I am concerned, for example, with what our children are learning when we create laws to force them to pledge their allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic, for which it stands, and so on, whether or not we make them say the “under God” part that was added in 1954. I am concerned when we perform social experiments on our children in the backlash of anti-Communist or other fundamentalist campaigns of terror. I am concerned when people talk about passing laws to govern the direct shaping of a child’s beliefs, particularly as a means to bonsai the faith-based decisions of the adult that they will become (whether those decisions are religious in nature or otherwise). I think that our young adults should have some say in this matter, and that their influence should be handled functionally as participation in a real vote. (Well, as real as any vote gets in the US.)

Furthermore, I don’t think that any child should be forced to make an oath of allegiance as a price paid to attend public school. I think it’s horribly ill advised in general to force children to take oaths before they understand what that act means, because you will trivialize it to the point where the taking of an oath is nothing to them when they are old enough to understand. Oaths are like prayers, voting, truth-telling, or acts of other-centered behavior, in that you can’t make someone believe that they are meaningful and worth their high regard just by forcing them to engage in rote, formal, empty versions of them. On the contrary, all you will do is ingrain the sense of meaninglessness.

The Founders of our country were familiar with that process of trivialization by formal worship, and they went to great lengths to separate the US from those systems that had become meaningless in their adherence to the Letter rather than the Spirit.

Sometimes the US is described as having been created with a clear separation between church and state, but that was just one instantiation of a broader, more general principle of noninterference, of which our Founders were terribly fond. They loved this “independence” more than their lives. Among other things, they didn’t want the US to suffer the same sorts of civil wars that had plagued Britain for so many hundreds of years. They refused to execute people on the basis of religious allegiance. They would not lock people up for failure to worship in the same way as the current President, their neighbors, or their teachers and classmates. They would not even force a witness to swear in court, if that person’s religion would have them make an affirmation instead. In short, our laws would govern actions, not beliefs.

I don’t know why I know that, or where I learned it, or when I first wrote it, so I fervently hope that I didn’t steal it. Regardless, it’s true.

I also don’t know when it became more important to some parents that their children (and everyone else’s) say certain words whether or not they believe them. And I don’t know when those people started to think that those children wouldn’t grow up to figure out how they had been used as pawns in these adult ego-based tantrums. What is particularly grotesque is that some people do recognize that they had been subjected to brain (and heart) washing by their parents, understand that it was wrong, and yet they do it to their own children anyway.

Because these kids will figure out what you were really up to when you thought it sounded so good to talk about your concern for the children’s welfare and so on, as if that were the pure, selfless, and only motive rattling around in your sociopolitical brain case.

I mean, children will sometimes try to use excuses with you, or give you explanations for their motives, without realizing just how easily you can see through to the truth. And then they are mystified as to how you could tell so easily that they were being less than honest. They don’t fully realize that you can recognize their untruths from your own childhood experience with failing to get away with the same stupid excuses (or perhaps even worse ones). Well, that’s what’s going to happen when your kids grow up, if by then you haven’t figured out how to be entirely honest about your real motives. They will be able to see through you because they will have had a lifetime to get to know who you really are.

Don’t be equally mystified, then, when you try to use your grand-sounding arguments to hide your essential narcissism, only to hear your kids say, “Who do you think you’re trying to fool? Do you really think that you’ve been able to hide your basic egomania for decades behind a bunch of pretty words? I am not interested in your arguments anymore, you simply don’t have to control the TV remote all the time. Just give it up and relax; it’s someone else’s turn.” There’s simply no way to successfully use the same lies with people who have lived with you for twenty or thirty years. Well, okay, maybe with the adults because they can get stuck in a rut, but not with the kids as they grow up. At some point, they’ll have seen you at your worst. They’ll know that the real reason that you wanted to force the pledge on all of the children had everything to do with you, and nothing to do with them. And if they fail to call you on it, and keep humoring you along, it’s only because they don’t want to hurt you. So you’ll be manipulating their love for your own selfish gain.

Like I said, you have to be careful, just in case. Your kids are learning all the time, with everything you do.

So shame on you. (Well, okay, once again, perhaps not on you, since you would absolutely never do anything like this, but certainly on those people over there.)

So maybe it’s time to give the children some sort of influence on any vote that determines whether or not they have to take an oath every day (to their own god or to someone else’s) before being allowed to stay in school.

Maybe they aren’t interested in selling your flags.

Maybe they aren’t as invested in your ego as you are.

Maybe they just want to get on with it and wire something to house current.